I’m LGBTQQIAAP+. Gay rights can fuck off and die

Back when I was a young thing, it was ‘LGB’ and that was an end to it. Where did the rest of the alphabet soup come from?

LGB made sense. For all that the different groups within it had different interests, cultures and priorities all three had one positive thing in common – a stance that could be summed up along the lines of ‘We hold that romantic and sexual same-sex relationships are and should be deemed normal and healthy for those who wish to pursue them’. Lesbian, gay and bisexual people all have that in common. Easy.

But now add in the rest of the alphabet soup, and what does the whole group have in common? What statement can be made that unites the interests of a lesbian with a late-transitioning, autogynephilic trans-identified male who is attracted to women, and an asexual person who experiences no sexual attraction to anyone? Yet they all (L, T, A) belong – or so we are told – in the same alphabet soup.

LGB is about same-sex relationships. The remainder don’t even necessarily define themselves in opposition to normative heterosexuality. Heterosexual people can apparently be queer, so you can be straight and in the gang. There’s

even an extra ‘A’ in there for ‘allies’ that , the term used in identity politics for ‘people who belong to bad oppressor groups and are low on the victim hierarchy but still buy into our crazy and want to hang out with us, the victim elect, while constantly apologising for their existence and generally being whiny twats in the hope we’ll give them cookies’. What rights are they campaigning for? Why do they need a letter?

Because it’s not a campaign, it’s a club. And apparently these days you can still be in it even if you’re straight. Just say you’re nonbinary, declare yourself asexual, queer, questioning or an ally and you too can join a trendy gang that gives you permission to perform your virtue and special special difference from the normies, to take a nibble on the victim pie, to whip up Twitterstorms on behalf of whichever victim group is flavour of the month and, in a general way, soak up some of that nice righteousness that comes with being in an oppressed group. Even if you’re not really all that oppressed. (Is Jaden Smith oppressed?)

All very warm and fuzzy, but the upshot of this is that any clear message about gay rights is muffled as fuck. Indeed, once you buy into the idea that the alphabet soup needs to be ‘inclusive’ of the needs of all these people, most of whom have sod all in common and some of whom are actually just straight people who want to feel a bit special, you can’t really, actually, campaign for anything much. And if you try, the reality starts to bite, which is that you’ve created an umbrella group whose members, far from having shared interests, in fact have such mutually contradictory interests in many ways that the only way to be inclusive is for some or all of the letters to STFU. Campaign for contraception? The asexual non-shaggers get hurt feelings. Campaign for same-sex relationship acceptance? Not only do the bisexuals start complaining about invisibility (seriously, get over yourselves), but trans-identified heterosexual men start asserting that they are in fact also lesbians, so real lesbians should put out more. And then the lesbians get annoyed. (Of course here, we can guess who’s going to win the argument. Spoiler: cis lesbians are ugly and boring and their rights are all cool now yeah. So not the lesbians).

But I digress. What’s happened here is not, in fact, an expansion of the campaign for gay rights – it’s the disintegration of that campaign. It’s like what would happen if you decided in the name of inclusivity to open up the Olympics to competitive sewing, darts, poetry reading, cookery, dance and spelling bees. Suddenly you don’t have an athletics competition any more, you just have a vaguely feelgood sort of village show. (Which, coincidentally, is what’s happened to Pride marches, which used to be protests but are now ‘parades’ and sponsored by every virtue-signalling corporate under the sun, expressing nothing but vague, feelgood sort of general leftism with a side order of mild smugness at being a bit more victimy and self-righteous than those lame cishets). The alphabet soupers have in fact stolen the movement from under gay people, and killed it with inclusivity.

Then, the competing interests of genuine minorities (such as – whisper it – lesbians) suitably stifled, we are finding to our amazement that the loudest voices in the new, happy, inclusive alphabet soup movement are the same group as they are everywhere else: heterosexual men. Or, as they are now known, trans lesbians. Now that it’s impossible to campaign for the full range of self-evidently competing interests supposedly included in the alphabet soup, we have to prioritise someone. Who should we choose? I know – heterosexual men! And as new letters get added, and the original gay people start to protest, just watch as the newer ones, like cuckoos, begin to push them out of the nest.

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Author: The Sparrow

I’m UK-based. Politically I'd call myself 'alt-centrist' maybe. I'm a mother, among other things. I’m interested in the political and cultural side-effects of globalisation, the replacement of class politics by identity politics, and the emerging backlash against the regressive left.
I was a radical lefty once upon a time, though these days I'm just interested in following arguments wherever they go. I voted Leave, in the interests of positive, engaged globalisation within a democratic framework, though I'm a bit exasperated at how it's going so far. I’m a fan of liberty, free speech, home winemaking and practical feminism.
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